IF YOU GO

• What: The Arnold Sports Festival 2012 is expected to draw 175,000 people to
Columbus this week, including 18,000 athletes competing in more than 45 sports. The festival also
offers a fitness expo with 700 booths selling sports nutrition products, fitness equipment and
apparel.

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Big enough to play on the offensive line of her high-school football team that made it to a
state-championship game.

Now, Mangold hopes that her size — 5 foot 8 inches tall and 340 pounds — but, more importantly,
her strength and skill can help her achieve a lifelong dream of competing in the Olympics.

She’ll find out in a week, as the 22-year-old is one of 15 women invited to compete for two open
spots on the U.S. team in the Olympic Team Trials for weightlifting, which are to be held on
Sunday, the final day of the Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus.

Ranked second in the nation among women by USA Weightlifting, the Centerville native, now living
and training in Columbus, is in a strong position to make it to the Summer Olympics in London.

Mangold’s journey to a possible Olympic berth hasn’t been easy, and it wouldn’t have come
through Columbus had she not faced the biggest setback in her weightlifting career by not
completing all her lifts at the 2010 American Open in Cincinnati. She won the competition twice, in
2009 and 2011.

“Bombing out” of the 2010 competition, as Mangold puts it, might have been the best thing that
could have happened. That’s because, at a friend’s urging, she decided to stay in Columbus to train
with Mark Cannella while recovering from knee surgery.

After a month of training with Cannella and the Columbus Weightlifting club at the Columbus YMCA
North, Mangold went on to achieve personal bests at last year’s Arnold Sports Festival.

“Mark’s technical eye might be the best in the world,” Mangold said. She wouldn’t tell him that,
she added with a laugh, because she doesn’t want him to get a big head.

But he did get results. Mangold has added 66 pounds to the weight she lifts in competition over
the past year.

Cannella, the club’s coach since 2000, said Mangold’s progress has been nothing short of
incredible. “I think she can compete with the best in the world,” he said.

A lot of people don’t realize that Olympic-style weightlifting involves more than picking up
something heavy. He likened the proper lift to a golf swing: Technique is at least as important as
strength.

Cannella said his training method is to look for what the athletes are doing wrong and then
drill them on technique. “It’s never good enough, and they know that about me,” he said.

Mangold has faced tough expectations before. When she started playing peewee football at 8 years
old, her father offered to serve as her coach and once made her bear-crawl for 80 yards in front of
the rest of the team because she had walked instead of run to get a drink of water.

“It was just because he wanted to make sure he never played favorites,” she said.

The story also illustrates that her family pushed her to do her best, and their support is a big
part of why she has succeeded, she said. There was a strict no-quitting rule in her house while
sports were in season, which Mangold said taught her not to give up when things got hard.

She started playing football to be like her older brother, Nick, who would go on to be a star at
Ohio State University and now plays center for the NFL’s New York Jets.

“I was at the age where everything my brother did was super cool, and I wanted to be just like
him,” she said.

Knowing there was little outlet for her to pursue football in college, despite her love for it,
she switched to another of the many sports she played while growing up: track and field. Mangold
attended Ursuline College, a private school for women in a suburb of Cleveland, on a scholarship to
compete in discus and shot put.

Successful at Olympic-style weightlifting in her senior year of high school, Mangold tracked
down coach Daniel Bell so she could continue to train while in college. Bell, who lived about an
hour from the campus, said he had recognized her potential when he first saw her lift at a National
Junior Weightlifting Championship.

“It was caveman technique. It was awful, but she won,” he said. “She’s as strong as anyone out
there.”

Bell pushed her to apply to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., where she
trained for four months before competing in the American Open.

Part of the reason she fell in love with weightlifting is her extremely competitive nature.
Unlike the team sports she grew up with, lifting put her in the spotlight.

“There’s nothing better than getting onstage and either succeeding or failing … but it’s all on
you,” Mangold said.

She said she always had dreamed of competing in the Olympics while growing up; she just never
knew what sport it would be in. Once she tried weightlifting, everything clicked into place.

Mangold said becoming a football player and now a weightlifter has little to do with challenging
gender norms, and she’s not out to prove anything to the world.

She’s proof that people can blaze their own paths, though.

“As a person, you can do whatever you want to do,” she said. “If you have a dream, you have to
follow it, and you can’t worry about the social mirror of what you’re supposed to do.”